• As the account manager and project lead at digital-out-of-home technology firm, managed and developed client relationships with regards to content delivery for all North American accounts. Clients included out-of-home-media networks and retailers.

• Led product demonstrations of SaaS content management solutions to prospective and new clients to support the sales process.

• Created and implemented ongoing hardware and software QA plans to test new iterations of software platform, track critical issues, and triage bugs.

For this assignment I wanted to pull all the adjectives from psilocybin posts from Erowid Experience Vaults, store them in a list or a set, and replace all the adjectives in an input text. I ran into some issues with pulling all the adjectives correctly so for now I’m using replacing select adjectives from Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”.

Update: Talked with Allison and I was missing another nested for loop that was necessary to iterate individual worlds – updated in the gist below.

This week we continued working on our 2-Sided Box and moved over to using 3 ply 5mm wood and the slightly more powerful 60w epilog with some interesting results.

We also adjusted our design file to include a 5mm inner border which we hoped to use as a reference for sanding given the misalignment of our last attempt with foam core. The thinking here is that we could use this line as a reference point to sand a 45 degree angle so that the edges of pieces would connect together in a seamless way.

First Cut: This turned out offset. For some reason the laser cutter hiccuped and didn’t make outer vector cut line. We also misjudged the settings and set it too high, resulting in some scorching of the wood.

Second Cut: We adjusted our settings to match 3mm wood with 60w settings and only make a vector cut and the results were perfect. We attempted to make a 2nd run on the same sheet using raster only (with the raster outline in blue) so we could draw the reference-sanding line, but for some reason this resulted in a clean cut. We spotted this and cancelled the job before the cut moved to the 2nd piece.

first cut and second cut on wood

This resulted in 2 pieces, with one that had a 5mm shorter perimeter. We were foiled again, or so we thought. When we formed these 2 pieces together with hot glue we were surprised that they fit perfectly with no overhang. There was no need to test sand a 45 degree angle on the edges.

Third Cut: We purposefully replicated the error from our second cut (one piece 5mm shorter than the other), wrapped rubber bands around it, and soaked it in hot water in an impromptu wood bending attempt. After letting it dry out for over 24 hours, we pieced together the parts which had slightly bent with wood glue.

Hot soaking the third cut.Drying and bending the third cut.Setting the bottom.Setting the sides.

This week we produced a concept map which helped us identify some interesting questions informing our project of designing symbiosis (or commensalism or parasitism) with mycelium as it relates to the human body’s odor.

We started a google spreadsheet in an attempt to hone in our key and research questions for this project here.

This week’s assignment was to design a box whose final shape was not rectangular, limiting the number of 90 degree angles. It should have an opening and be able to sit on a table without support.

Francisco and I started with a basic paper box and played with its form by cutting out a corner.

Inspiration from Designing Games for Kids struck and we began examining examples of dice eventually coming across this gem which has no 90 degree angles.

two sided dice (no 90 degree angles!)

The form looked like it could be challenging to fabricate, but I remembered seeing some experiments from last semester in the shop with living hinges. We laser cut a few template examples on foam core and tested them.

The “fillet lattice” was the most malleable of the patterns and we applied this to a simple outline of what we thought the 2 pieces of the 2-sided dice container might look like. The next step is to improve the dimensions of the pieces so there’s no gap between the connections and experiment with different materials.

Homework #1. Create a Python program that behaves like a UNIX text processing program (such as cat, grep, tr, etc.). Your program should take text as input (any text, or a particular text of your choosing) and output a version of the text that has been filtered and/or munged. Be creative, insightful, or intentionally banal.

When I wrote the book – this is back in 2001, a science-fiction future year now firmly in our past – I have to admit I just thought of the technology (the flying cars, the moon colonies) as a kind of camp sci-fi joke, and the “feed” itself as primarily something symbolic. I wasn’t thinking about the reality of consumer technology. Even without a chip in my head, I already had the voice of advertising whispering in my brain that my life should be different, should be better, and that I’d be loved if I only would do what was demanded of me. So it was the effect of consumerism that was most important to me – not the real tech.

For this assignment I wanted to pull all the adjectives from psilocybin posts from Erowid Experience Vaults, store them in a list or a set, and replace all the adjectives in an input text. I ran into some issues with pulling all the adjectives correctly so for now I’m using replacing select adjectives from Marvin Gaye’s…

Fraco and I reviewed a few components and ideas that could be used in our mid-term including: puzzles mazes roulette wheels hunter trophies modular planters spirographs the jack-in-the-box For now we’re going to move forward with the idea of fabricating a lampshade. I’m thinking of experimenting with a softer wood, like balsa, spruce, or maybe bamboo.…

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that it is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk thought the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

By Billy Collins
From THE ART OF DROWNING (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995)

Homework #1. Create a Python program that behaves like a UNIX text processing program (such as cat, grep, tr, etc.). Your program should take text as input (any text, or a particular text of your choosing) and output a version of the text that has been filtered and/or munged. Be creative, insightful, or intentionally banal.

Fungus Project Proposal: Fungi Lego / K’nex: I’m interested in exploring the use of fungus as a biofabrication medium in order to examine its aesthetic and functional qualities. How can it be used to form shapes that would be otherwise difficult or environmentally unsound to create through other means such as 3-D molded or…

There will be great games made in VR, and gaming will probably dominate the VR narrative for the next few years. But longer term, we won’t think of games as essential to the medium. The original TV shows were newscasts and game shows, but today we think of TV screens as content-agnostic input-output devices.

News of a possible reboot of The X-Files began swirling all over the Internet this past weekend. Fox, according to reports, have had some informal logistical talks about the availability of the series’ three most important players (series creator Chris Carter is busy developing other projects, as are stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson; Duchovny’s new detective neo-noir, Charles Manson-centric series Aquarius is set to premiere on NBC later this year, while Anderson will be a series regular on the upcoming third season of Hannibal). It would seem that all three are keen to return, if the timing and circumstances are good, which is great news for fans of the show who may have felt that, well, it could’ve ended a lot better than it did.

Soylent inverts the Big Food business model, spending nothing on advertising and distributing solely through e-commerce. Soylent’s “marketing plan” is to invest in its online community and in peer-reviewed scientific studies. The belief is that the internet has made people smarter, and that the old tactics of selling junk food using clever advertising will be increasingly ineffective. We have all sorts of food-related problems in the world – malnutrition, diabetes, and obesity, to name a few. Part of the solution to these problems is providing people with better scientific research, and more food choices that are convenient, nutritious, and affordable.

Today we are announcing that Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $20M investment in Soylent, alongside our friends at Lerer Ventures and Index Ventures….

Future Islands’ breakout hit “Seasons (Waiting On You)” easily cracked the Stereogum staff’s favorite songs of the year list, it won two separate readers’ polls here, and yesterday a large swath of America’s music critics crowned it the best song of 2014. David Letterman is also a fan, and chances are, so are you. So please enjoy the following footage of Future Islands performing “Seasons” on Austin City Limits, a preview of this Saturday’s episode.

“We believe the future will look more like the past than the present, where beautiful old school things we love and are nostalgic about will not die as many have said. We hope to breathe life into things like books and album covers, keeping the creativity in physical products alive.”

Though he initially saw code cartooning as a “free lunch”—a way to generate massive amounts of surreal artwork with little effort—he quickly discovered that truly random works were rarely all that interesting to look at. “I’ve found I have to do extensive editing and revision on each page’s program until what it creates with randomness has clarity, mystery, humor, and feeling,” he explains on his website. These days, Pound sees randomness as a sort of collaborative partner.

Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

Hugstr: A carnival-style hugging game installation. Summary: Hugstr is a peer to peer hugging game designed to encourage hug giving, hug receiving, and conversation around the act. One user dons the Hugstr outfit (a silly animal hat connected to mittens) and gives a hug to someone. The “strength” of the hug is calculated through sensors in the…

Jer Thorp refutes the notion of the API being a weighty corporate undertaking and examines their creation and function in the expressive and political realm in his post Art and the API. He points to The Dronestream API and Out of Signt, Out of Mind (built with the former) as examples of this relationship of tool and…

My ICM final project has come a long, winding way from the initial idea of “Murakami Too” that I presented 2 weeks ago. Murakami Too from Song Hia Things created during this portion of the project: Analyzed 13 novel corpus of Haruki Murkami to create a concordance of the top 5% most frequently occurring words…

This site incorporates a Processing sketch I converted to p5.js and includes a class that I created to pull suggestions for initial project ideas. It’s the first phase of a framework for generating and refining ideas and was directly inspired by a brainstorming session presented by ITP residents Sarah Rothberg and Mike Allison. It parallels…

update 11/17/14: press RETURN to save a screenshot of your haiku These poems were generated by creating a concordance of the top 5% most frequently used words from Haruki Murakami’s 13 novels and curating them for inclusion via JSON with the RiTa HaikuGrammar sample. This still needs a bit of work. The syllable categorization…

In most countries women were not permitted to fight on the front lines of the war. Instead, they supported the war effort by learning, training and taking up jobs usually held by men.

These women did a lot more than rivet, they designed, built and tested thousands of aircraft in factories across Canada and the US. Prior to the war, women would have been mostly banned from taking up such jobs.

This week’s assignment: create a web server and publish some HTML and CSS. To do this, we used Servi.js to build a simple web server in Node and used the Node.js script Forever to keep it running. 1000 yard stare is live for now.